The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois has named Assistant Professor Jana Diesner a Faculty Fellow and provided seed funding for her project, “Predictive Modeling for Impact Assessment.” Diesner was one of thirteen faculty members selected for the honor.
Diesner will work closely with NCSA scientists on the project, which builds on her work developing computational solutions to assess the impact of issue-focused information projects such as social justice documentaries and books. Her research team leverages big social data for this purpose and combines techniques from machine learning and natural language processing to identify a fine-grained set of impact factors from textual data sources such as news articles, reviews, and social media. This project, says Diesner, “aims to locate and categorize evidence for behavioral, cognitive, attitudinal, and emotional change from a variety of data sources.”
Diesner’s work sits at the intersection of computing, data science, culture, and society. She expects her collaboration with NCSA, especially with colleagues from the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (I-CHASS) as well as her access to NCSA’s advanced cyberinfrastructure, to help advance our understanding of impact.
“Increasingly, funders are interested in understanding the broader societal impact that can be achieved with their investments. Solutions to this problem also have implications for the science sector as funders, universities, and review bodies are starting to conduct data-driven assessment that consider impact indicators including and beyond citation counts. My project can help us to be prepared leaders and demonstrate excellence in research and development related to society-scale impact assessment,” said Diesner.